THE SIGNATURE OF ALL THINGS by Elizabeth Gilbert, narrated by Juliet Stevenson
Of course, this novel is wonderful. Of course it has Liz Gilbert’s wonderful style, now transmuted so that it sounds like something out of the 19th century. Of course there are eccentric, larger-than-life characters. But what made this book come alive for me was the BRILLIANT NARRATION of Juliet Stevenson, who caught the gruff shouts […]
COMMITTED: A SKEPTIC MAKES PEACE WITH MARRIAGE by Elizabeth Gilbert, narrated by the author
I don’t know much about Elizabeth Gilbert as a writer as I don’t read magazines like GQ or Esquire, Allure or Real Simple, because I don’t read short stories or articles, not regularly at any rate, instead mostly confining myself to historical novels. So COMMITTED was a pleasant surprise for me. As with all my […]
THE LAST AMERICAN MAN, by Elizabeth Gilbert, narrated by Patricia Kalember
This is an amazing story, written by an amazing writer. What a great stylist Liz Gilbert is! I LOVED the carefully crafted casualness of her prose style – a gossip at the local cafe with superb editing. Eustace Conway is about my age, but when he was 17, he didn’t finish his A-Levels and go […]
THE STORYTELLER by Jodi Picoult, narrated by Mozhan Marno (Sage), Jennifer Ikeda (Anya), Edoardo Ballerini (Josef), Suzanne Toren (Minka), Fred Berman (Leo)
This has to be the first novel, or at least the first novel in a long time of Jodi Picoult’s that DIDN’T end in a courtroom! Which was refreshing. As usual, Jodi Picoult tackles a difficult moral issue. What would YOU do if a 95-year-old man asked you to help him to die? Most of […]
LONE WOLF by Jodi Picoult narrated by Natalia Payne (Helen), Louis Changchien (Joe), Celeste Ciulla (Georgie), Nick Cordero (Edward), Angela Goethals (Cara), Mark Zeisler (Luke), and Andy Paris (Barney)
It is fascinating to see how Jodi Picoult makes her characters come alive. One of the main characters, Luke Warren, is lying in a hospital bed, in a coma throughout this entire novel, and so Ms. Picoult has to make him come alive via interior monologue. What is brilliant about this technique is that the […]
I’ve just launched my NEW Patreon page!
I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this to all of you, but this summer my big project is a complete rebranding of myself as author and a complete revamp of my website! That includes my new Patreon Page! What this means for you: Spun Stories is going to be replaced by Cynthia Sally Haggard (there […]
SECRET GERMANY: Stefan George and his Circle by Robert Edward Norton
Who was Stefan George? If you look him up, you will find out that he was born in 1868 and died in 1933, and that he was a poet. In fact, he was one of the most important and influential poets to have written in German, making him as great as Goethe, Hölderlin or Rilke. […]
THE BEAST’S GARDEN BY Kate Forsyth. Narrated by Jennifer Vuletic.
I am a fan of Kate Forsyth. I love the way in which she takes folk tales and put a new twist on them. I loved Bitter Greens (her take on Rapunzel), and The Wild Girl, her story behind the story of how the Grimm brother’s acquired their tales, from their next-door neighbor Dortchen Wild. […]
Maggie Gyllenhal’s movie based upon Elena Ferrante’s THE LOST DAUGHTER drops today on Netflix!
THE LOST DAUGHTER by Elena Ferrante is a meditation on motherhood. When 40-something Leda decides to rent a beach house near Naples for the summer, her unaccustomed solitude leads her to meditate on her life and her daughters. Now that her daughters (both in their twenties) have grown and moved far away to Toronto, Canada, […]
Emile Zola’s NANA
NANA, published in 1880 by Emile Zola, is an interesting take on sex-obsessed Paris of the nineteenth century, the Paris that has now become a stereotype for sexual behavior in our own times. The heroine, Nana, is both available and unavailable. She gains notoriety when she bares all and appears on the stage in the […]
